Students named finalists in Adobe Analytics Challenge

Two teams of USC students have made it to the finals of Adobe’s 15th annual Analytics Challenge, a business and technology competition open to university students from across the country.

This year’s teams consist of first-year Master’s in Business Administration students Edward Cho, Mary Qin and Mrinal Trikha, who make up Team DataInsights, and Naman Gupta, Kathryn Lin and Seerut Sidhu, who call themselves Team Adobe Task Force.

Team DataInsights said that they assembled their team after realizing that they had similar interests and skills, specifically focusing on digital marketing competition along with data analytics. They felt as if they could fill in the gaps that the other teams possessed.

“We all love data analytics, and there are so many insights that we have gained,” Cho said. “I personally have learned so much about customer-level data analytics. Big data in marketing gives really big opportunities for companies to capitalize on.”

Adobe started the Analytics Challenge to recognize the importance of analyzing data, as the competition seeks to close the data skills gap and nurture the next wave of tech leaders. This year’s sponsor, Sony, will provide $50,000 in total prizes to the top six teams, with first place receiving $30,000.

Participants have the opportunity to utilize their skills to analyze data from the real world offered by Sony’s PlayStation app and Playstation.com. This offered competitors access to information on site traffic, visitor retention and conversion, in-app user action metrics, device information and average session length. Students are tasked with analyzing the user experience, conversion rates and “stickiness” in order to provide Sony with recommendations for optimization.

Qin said that her team’s strategy focused on combining all of their individual talents to analyze the data and look for patterns.

“We had to figure out the relationships between the sets of data,” Qin said. “When we came up with the initial plan, we tried many different approaches and then finally narrowed it down to the one we presented and kept winning. Hopefully we will continue to do so.”

Trikha added that perseverance helped the team get to the final round of the competition.

“Sometimes you are hoping for some things out of the data, but you don’t always get that,” Trikha said. “Through this process, I have learned that you have to provide recommendations that are actually impactful. It is so important, because through this information we can predict future patterns, and it will become so much easier to collect information and store it with advancing technology.”

Members of Team Adobe Task Force, meanwhile, said that though it has been difficult working with only three people, they have been able to learn from their peers and develop their own skills over time.

“It’s great exposure to actually use the software,” Lin said. “We are able to use information to create a better experience for customers, but also increased revenue for the company.”

Gupta expressed gratitude to the competition for providing him the opportunity to engage in an activity that will help him with his future career in the technology field.

“The competition has been going on for over a month now, so our time-management skills have improved drastically since we have had to balance this with midterms, finals and other schoolwork,” Gupta said.

The finals of the competition will take place on Nov. 18 at the Adobe campus in Lehi, Utah. The two USC teams are competing against teams from Yale University, Brigham Young University, the University of Utah and the University of California, Los Angeles.